Where The Rooks Post Up

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Talk story about the Professional Chess Association's first Intel World Chess Grand Prix; Bob Rice, the commissioner of the P.C.A.; and the marketability of chess tournaments for a television audience. Describes the speed-chess tournament held for four days the other week at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Garry Kasparov, the World Chess Champion, moved a pawn two squares. ESPN, the sports network, believes that the speed format will make good television. Beginning July 27th, it will broadcast a tape of the first tournament of the Grand Prix, which was held in Moscow in April. (The Grand Prix will next move to London for another tournament, and then to Paris.) Bob Rice is confident that the speeded-up game will find a TV audience. In this game, Mr. Kasparov defeated Viswanathan Anand, who is called "the speed king of India." Mr. Rice, who is thirty-nine years old and cheerfully intense, is a partner at the law firm of Milband, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. In the fall of 1990, he asked his wife for a birthday present of tickets to the world chess championship then being held here. After attending the tournament, Mr. Rice saw a potential market. The audience was composed largely of people who work on Wall Street. "The demographics were excellent," he said. He then formed the Wall Street Chess Club. It was intended originally as a way to lure potential legal clients over to Milbank's offices. Stephen Griedman, the chairman of Goldman, Sachs, and a number of big traders from Saloman Brothers were among those who came. And then the real players began to show up. Mr. Rice said, "The big joke was that the Wall Street guys were coming to learn how to play chess and the chess guys were coming to learn how to make money." Mr. Kasparov would drop by when he was in town, and early last year, after he broke with FIDE, the decades-old governing body of the chess world, he called Mr. Rice. Thereupon the Professional Chess Association was born. Mr. Rice foresees a day when chess players will be sports stars.